A Poker Blog

Archive for June, 2010

We made it to Little Rock safe and sound. After Tuesday, we finished the day closer to Florida than California. No turning back now.

Driving weather was perfect, no rain. Only the occasional crosswinds to deal with and a few kamikaze truckers. Truckers will blast past with only a few feet between you and their behemoth 18 wheeler. At night, it can get a little hairy.

Can we talk about highway 40 thru OKC? my gawd man. Tina was white knuckling it hoping our (her) precious fragile cargo would remain intact. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I was glad I triple wrapped our LCD TV with moving pads and placed it carefully in the Audi. Shit might be jostling around in the back of the truck. But the TV will be ready for service on day one.

Tomorrow we ship off thru four states en route to Macon, Georgia. Please let this be over soon.

After breakfast and gassing up the truck we hit the road at approximately 11:30am AZ time. Skies were clear as was the road thru the first few hours. Just before we hit Albuquerque a rainstorm hit. We even saw some lightning. We haven’t seen lightning in quite a while making the drive slippery but interesting. Tina got a little nervous on occasion one time blurting out “you need to slow down”. I was able to drive 70-75 mph when skies were clear but had to slow it up during the rainstorm. She was a little uncomfortable with me getting a “running start” to an upcoming hill.

On our first day of travel we climbed over 7000 feet into Flagstaff. At times, we were coming up hills as slow as 40-45 mph. Today we ran into a few hills but never drove slower than 60 mph on the highway. I told Tina everything would be fine, we might just have a close call. She wasn’t laughing. I thought it was kind of funny.

One thing i’ve noticed is I haven’t seen a single roadside call box since leaving California. There have been times when our cell reception was no bueno through long stretches. What happens if we have a blow out? We have no spare for the trailer. Are we supposed to pull over and pray? Shoot a flare? Hope a random tow truck stops or CHP? This is 2010 and there’s no easy access to emergency road side assistance on the interstate? WTF??

Another thing that sucks about driving east is we lost 2 hours going from Flagstaff to Amarillo (AZ to CST time zone). So instead of getting to our hotel at 10pm we arrive at 12am and find ourselves scrambling around to find somewhere to eat dinner.

It took us 2 days to load the truck. Getting the boxes and big furniture on board was a lot of work but what took the most time was all the odd shaped odds and ends. Our neighbor described it as a simple game of tetris. He wasn’t far off. Luckily, we had neighbors and my nephew and niece offer to help. Otherwise it would have easily taken twice as long.

After loading the truck I had some trouble with the jack on the car carrier. It wouldn’t lower onto the the hitch. I was on trailer tilt for a few hours until their road service tech finally fixed us up. This set us back and we were unable to get into Flagstaff until approximately 1:30am local time.

Dog’s road antics.

Tina had planned to finish a 24 page paper that is due on Monday. But wasn’t able to get much done because our mutt decided to act like a little bitch and jump on her lap every time we hit a rough patch of road. Man up mutt, you’re not a fucking lap dog.

Since we got into Flagstaff so late and Tina has a deadline, we decided to stay an extra night. Shortly after I booked our room for Flagstaff, the hotel emailed me an offer to stay Sunday night for almost half their normal rate. No brainer.

We’ll be back on the road Monday morning grinding miles to our next planned stop in Amarillo. Good times.

Tina has done a kick ass job with a lot of the packing. I realize since we’re married everything is supposed to be 50/50 but there aint no fuckin’ way half of these boxes contain anything remotely close to some shit I need or want. I’ve been taking care of other odds and ends along with some of my own packing.

We sold Tina’s car a few weeks ago. This was becoming a worry because we had it up on AutoTrader for over two months before we got our first real offer. We got less than Tina wanted but I was glad we were done with it. But, don’t feel sorry for her one bit. She’s tooling around in my Audi while I can’t go anywhere until she gets home. Fortunately, this hasn’t become too much of a problem.

Today I listed our BBQ on craigslist for free-fiddy-free and within minutes emails and phone calls were rolling in. The grill wasn’t very well taken care of so I didn’t think I could get much for it anyway. But, the 15 year old kid who got here first was extremely excited to have his own grill. I gave him a quick primer on the intricacies in the art of grilling and he was on his way.

Enjoy, junior grill master.

Shortly afterwards I got a phone call on the washer and dryer from one of the neighbors. We put up signs on the mailboxes in our complex listing on the shit we wanted to dump. He and his wife are expecting and were in dire need of a W/D. I took a deposit and that’s now a done deal. Next up is the refrigerator.

We’re getting rid of a bunch of crap so we don’t have to drive some jumbo sized truck towing my car 2600+ miles. Much of it will be replaced when we get there and it will be nice to have some new shit instead the old crap we’ve been rockin’ for that past 7 years.